I’ll indulge you and look at the pictures.

I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory of the past events as the snail leaves its slime.
Francis Bacon in conversation in Daniel Farson

I don’t have a photograph, but you can have my footprints. They’re upstairs in my socks.

I learned from Nol that nowadays you [ Willem Witsen ] are especially engaged upon enlargements [of photos]. I would like to ask you if you perhaps have a piece of moorland (foreground) for me, I would be very grateful to you. Because I am working on a painting with a large foreground. You may have seen it, with that artillery in it. It must be a simple sloping ground. Without much frills of sand - etc. nothing but heather.. (translation from the original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)

If you [Vollard] should ever happen to find that picture ['Milliners's workshop'] by Edgar Degas ] I know an American who will pay any price for it.

It's like he would take a photograph of Sam, and the photograph
would be beautiful. And he would think that the reason the
photograph was beautiful was because of how he took it. If I took
it, I would know that the only reason it's beautiful is because of
Sam.

version in original Dutch (citaat van Breitner's brief, in het Nederlands:) Ik vernam van Nol dat ge u tegenwoordig speciaal bezig houdt met vergrootingen [van foto's]. Ik zou je wel willen vragen als je soms een stuk heidegrond (voorgrond). voor me had, zou ik je zeer dankbaar zijn. Ik ben naml. aan een schilderij bezig met groote voorgrond. je hebt het misschien wel gezien, met die artillerie er op. Het moet een eenvoudig opglooiende grond [zijn]. Zonder veel tierelantijntjes van zand – etc niets anders dan heide..

I heard nothing from his excellence [Mr. Keiller bought a picture of 1000 pond and sent Israëls the money but no word about the picture].. .I am sure he will be satisfied by it when he hears it is good. I have some practice in those matters of amateurs. The best pictures are the worst for them naturally. They have not the tools to understand it, but when they hear other saying it is fine, they make a high breast saying 'I' ordered that picture..

A picture is worth a thousand words.

One time, this guy handed me a picture of him, he said "Here's a picture of me when I was younger." Every picture is of you when you were younger. "Here's a picture of me when I'm older." "You son-of-a-bitch! How'd you pull that off? Lemme see that camera... What's it look like? "

We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.

I just made pictures I would've liked to see.

I was sorry for Gabriel that all the efforts you have employed so diligently were in vain to help him to sell one of his paintings in [the exposition in Amsterdam, in] 'Arti'. Is there not any chance to order from him a small presentable painting (backed up by me, if it will help) for one or the other? He really deserves it and hundred guilders can mean so much at some moments. (translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)

There is a famous black-and-white photograph from the era of the Third Reich. It is a picture taken in Hamburg, Germany, in 1936, of shipyard workers, a hundred or more, facing the same direction in the light of the sun. They are heiling in unison, their right arms rigid in outstretched allegiance to the Führer. If you look closely, you can see a man in the upper right who is different from the others. His face is gentle but unyielding. Modern-day displays of the photograph will often add a helpful red circle around the man or an arrow pointing to him. He is surrounded by fellow citizens caught under the spell of the Nazis. He keeps his arms folded to his chest, as the stiff palms of the others hover just inches from him. He alone is refusing to salute. He is the one man standing against the tide. Looking back from our vantage point, he is the only person in the entire scene who is on the right side of history. Everyone around him is tragically, fatefully, categorically wrong. In that moment, only he could see it. His name is believed to have been August Landmesser. At the time, he could not have known the murderous path the hysteria around him would lead to. But he had already seen enough to reject it.